Kunsthalle Basel

Can gestures such as the shifting of the language and tone of Kunsthalle Basel’s public communication or the artist’s contracting of a life insurance in which the Basler Kunstverein’s more than one thousand members are the beneficiaries reveal invisible but intertwined connections between an institution, its history, and its economic status as it meets mortality, the poetic, and the affective? And can this unraveling act as a “score” that performatively animates an exhibition across its duration? These are the preoccupations at the heart of the site-specific project for Kunsthalle Basel by Iris Touliatou (* 1981), her first solo show in Switzerland and largest exhibition to date. Entitled Gift, suggesting both a present when read in English, and a poison when read in German, the exhibition of the Greek artist explores both senses of a “Gift” in an experimental exhibition that weaves together the life of an institution with that of an artist.